Handling File Upload In PHP

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A very useful aspect of PHP is its ability to manage file uploads to your server. Allowing users to upload a file to your server opens a whole can of worms, so please be careful when enabling file uploads.
 
PHP – File Upload: HTML Form
 
Before you can use PHP to manage your uploads, you must first build an HTML form that lets users select a file to upload. See our XHTML Tutorial’s Form lesson for a more in-depth look at forms.
 
HTML Code:
  
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" 
action="<?php echo $PHP_SELF;?>" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" 
name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="100000" />
Choose a file to upload: 
<input name="uploadedfile" type="file" /><br />
<input type="submit" 
value="Upload File" name=”submit” />
</form>
 
Here is a brief description of the important parts of the above code:
 
• enctype=”multipart/form-data” – Necessary for our to-be-created PHP file to function properly.

• action=”uploader.php” – The name of our PHP page that will be created, shortly.
• method=”POST” – Informs the browser that we want to send information to the server using POST.

• input type=”hidden” name=”MA… – Sets the maximum allowable file size, in bytes, that can be uploaded. This safety mechanism is easily bypassed and we will show a solid backup solution in PHP. We have set the max file size to 100KB in this example.

• input name=”uploadedfile” – uploadedfile is how we will access the file in our PHP script.
 
Save that form code into a file and call it upload.php. If you view it in a browser it should look like this:
 
img
 
The complete example: simple-upload.php
  
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> PHP Tutorial: Working with File Upload </TITLE>
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="jNote-iT">

</HEAD>

<BODY>
<form name= "file_upload_form" 
enctype="multipart/form-data" action="<?php echo $PHP_SELF;?>" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="100000" />
Choose a file to upload: <input name="uploadedfile" type="file" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Upload File" name="submit" />
</form>
<?php 
if (isset($_POST['submit']))
{
echo "<hr><hr>";
	$filedir="c:/upload/";// of on Linux [/var/www/upload] etc 
	$upload_file=$filedir.basenam
e($_FILES['uploadedfile']['name']) or die ("Unable to retrieve the file.");
	$tmp=$_FILES['uploadedfile']['tempname'];
	
	echo "<pre><b>";
	if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES['uploadedfile']['tempname'],$upload_file))
	{
		echo "\nFile ".$_FILES['uploadedfile']['name']." uploaded successfully";
	}
	else 
		echo "Unable to upload file<b>".$tmp."</b>";
}
?>

</BODY>
</HTML>
 
When executed the above script should display following output:
 
img
 
Uploaded file in the upload directory:
 
img
 
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